The new nuclear math
Pick a number. Any number. How about 1,500? That’s how many nuclear weapons General Nikolai Solovtsov wants to keep in the Russian arsenal at the conclusion of the next round of START negotiations with the US. “We must not go below 1,500 warheads,” the head of Russia’s strategic missile forces said in an interview this week.
Maybe you prefer 160? That’s the number of operationally deployed warheads the UK has settled on as “a minimum, safe, and effective” nuclear deterrent. The Indian Defence Ministry reportedly likes the number 400, which would suggest that Delhi still considers itself a few hundred warheads shy of a “safe minimum.”
The North Korean government has been sending a loud and clear message that one or two nukes should be enough to make its enemies think twice. The state-run newspaper has promised a “merciless” retaliatory strike “to those who touch the country’s dignity and sovereignty even a bit.”
There are six other nuclear weapon states with arsenals of varying sizes, who appear to have made their own calculations about what constitutes a “minimum” number of nuclear weapons for an “effective deterrent.” Picture rooms full of actuaries and auditors laboring over computer spreadsheets containing rows of targets and columns of warheads, plugging in different population densities and explosive yields and observing the effect on the peaks and troughs of the casualty graph until the elusive number appears with statistical precision.
“Look, Reggie, there it is! Our absolute minimum deterrent.”
In the twisted logic of nuclear deterrence, the North Korean math, while just as opaque and dysfunctional as anyone else’s, is at least brutally honest. One need only recall the devastation caused by two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to understand why it would be a bad idea to provoke a country in possession of even a handful of such weapons.
The problem with deterrence theory is the hidden assumption that it will never fail. If the strategists could guarantee that deterrence will work perfectly and forever, then one arbitrary “minimum” force level would be as good as any other. The truth is that they can’t, and it won’t, and it’s not.
In the real world, where the lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that nuclear weapons must never be used again, where preventing their use by others is the only remotely defensible reason for having them yourself, and where even that rationale is unsustainable over the long term, only one number exists that is not arbitrary: zero.
General Solovtsov conceded that “this decision is up to the political authorities of the country.” President Medvedev will meet with President Obama next month in Moscow to set goals for the START negotiations. Across-the-board reductions to 500 nuclear weapons in each country, as unlikely as that seems this time around, would send a signal to France (with 300) and China (with about 200) and the others (with fewer than 400 among them) that the road to zero is open for traffic. Any number higher than 1,000 will amount to a squandered opportunity.
Russian Prime Minister Putin told the BBC this week that “If those who made the atomic bomb and used it are ready to abandon it, along with—I hope—other nuclear powers that officially or unofficially possess it, we will of course welcome and facilitate this process in every possible way.”
Are the “political authorities” ready to give the generals a lesson in the new math? Let’s hope so.
Nuclear Posture Review
WAND has a great action going at the moment, although it seems that only US citizens can use the form on their web page. They are asking you to write to President Obama to encourage him to make sure the Nuclear Posture Review advances nuclear abolition. Here’s what I wrote:
Dear President Obama,
You have understood that nuclear weapons are more of a liability than an asset; they create more risks than they address. I too wish to see a world free of nuclear weapons, but I would like to see it in my lifetime.
As your Administration undertakes its Nuclear Posture Review, please ensure that the reviewers keep the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons firmly in mind. The policies and plans set forth in the Review should both reflect and further this ultimate goal.
Most importantly, the first step should be preventing the use of nuclear weapons. For this reason, while nuclear weapons are still in existence, it should be clearly stated that the United States does not intend to use them in a first strike, but only in retaliation, in the very unlikely event that another country uses nuclear weapons against it. They should not be used as a deterrence against conventional attack or for attack using biological or chemical weapons. This would be disproportionate and is quite clearly illegal under international law.
Preventing the use of nuclear weapons also means taking them off high alert. This should be a priority in talks with Russia about a follow-on treaty for START 1. If we could get away from the Launch-On-Warning posture, the world would immediately be a safer place. It would also improve the security relationship with Russia and end the Cold War definitively.
The new NPR should renounce the “Axis of Evil” and signal to all those countries that were named as targets that the US seeks to improve its security relationship with those countries.
Those are some of my suggested first steps. Who am I to be saying this? I am a disarmament expert from Germany and the UK that has been working for the last 30 years for the abolition of nuclear weapons. I work for the nobel-peace prize winning organisation The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)
Sincerely,
Xanthe Hall, Berlin
If you want to take part in this action, go to WAND’s webpage.
Xanthe
Power struggle in North Korea
Despite speculation in the Western media about recent developments in the DPRK — in particular the nuclear test announced by the North Korean government on May 25 —we know little of what goes on in the leadership of the country. The information we get is unreliable and we hear little from the North Korean side.
Recent conversations with experts who have some direct access to the discussions in the DPRK leadership suggest that the power centers in the country may be more fractured than most of us realize, and that this may actually increase the dangers in an already dangerous region.
There is an ongoing fight between the military leaders and certain politicians and diplomats, especially those in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the past year, the military has, in general, made the decisions regarding foreign policy. Yet these same military leaders have little information, experience, or understanding of the world outside the DPRK. They not only believe they can win a war against South Korea, but they even talk of the need for a war against the “archenemy” Japan.
Many politicians in Pyongyang, we are told, understand and regret that recent actions by the DPRK have contributed to an increased tension in the area. Their influence in relation to an unyielding military, however, may be too slight to fend off war in response to a mistake or a provocation.
Little is known — inside or outside the DPRK — about the health and status of President Kim Jong-Il, and the recent naming of his successor has only fueled speculation.
During the Korean conflict in the 1950s, US General Douglas MacArthur threatened to use nuclear weapons against the North. Korean prisoners of war who had experienced the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came back telling of this terrifying weapon. North Koreans say these two facts spurred Kim Il Sung to start a nuclear weapons program .
The DPRK chose to build a plutonium bomb. This fitted with the concept of “self-reliance” in the Juche philosophy of Kim Il Sung. The research reactor in Yongbyon, after some initial assistance from the Soviet Union, was built and run without foreign help. Enough plutonium has reportedly been extracted for four to eight charges.
Building a plutonium bomb, however, is difficult. The first DPRK test, conducted in October 2006 after decades of work, was essentially a dud, with a yield of less than one kiloton. The second test explosion, on May 25, 2009 (Memorial Day in the US) seems to have worked perfectly. While the first test was publicized in advance, no notice was given before the second test; had it failed, we may never have known.
We do not know how many bombs are in the DPRK’s arsenal (though the number must be quite small) or whether they would detonate as intended. That the North has no reliable missiles able to carry these warheads to Japan or further does not matter. The bombs are political weapons intended to deter a possible aggressor, and they give more confidence to the military. As long as the DPRK generals believe that the US and the South Korean generals believe that the bombs may work, that is enough. The successful nuclear weapons test has, therefore, also achieved its second objective — to strengthen the influence of the generals in Pyongyang.
Negotiations regarding the nuclear program have been going on — or on and off — for at least 15 years. They have brought status to the DPRK and its leader, domestically and abroad. They have been used to extort oil and rice, and have been interrupted whenever the DPRK has felt that its negotiating partners — particularly the US — have not kept their part of the agreements. Inclusion by the Bush administration in the “axis of evil” stopped the cooperation for some time.
President Obama offered North Korea a fresh start. Soon after the beginning of his presidency, however, there was a very large military exercise in South Korea with US forces in mighty display. The DPRK protested, then tested a missile. The UN Security Council condemned the test and threatened more sanctions. North Korea, in turn, threatened that sanctions would lead to a strong reaction from Pyongyang. Pyongyang asked why the DPRK had been singled out and prohibited from launching a satellite.
The Security Council condemned the May 25 test and added new sanctions. South Korea joined the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and signaled its intention to board DPRK ships on international waters if it suspects that the ship might contain “weapons of mass destruction.” (An incident in the disputed waters along the 38th parallel, where military actions have occurred in the past, may be more likely.) The North predictably declared that such an action by the South would constitute an infraction of the Armistice Agreement and would be an act of war. Less predictably, the DPRK declared the Armistice void! They have tested more missiles and are preparing a test of a long-range missile.
Why, we asked the experts, has the DPRK taken this road rather than accept the invitation from President Obama to bilateral negotiations? The military exercise was a holdover from the previous administration; the Security Council sanctions could have been negotiated away. Instead you have chosen a road that leads to increased tension, and an increased risk of war.
According to our sources, many politicians in the DPRK, particularly in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wanted to resume negotiations, but the military leaders — arguing that negotiations had failed time and again and that only military strength counts — prevailed. They believe that the South does not want a conflict and could not handle millions of refugees; and that with nuclear weapons as a deterrent, the USA and South Korea will go out of their way to avoid a serious confrontation..
The generals say (and believe!) they can win a war. They have talked of their invincible forces for so long that they have come to believe their own words. The situation is very tense and dangerous. Generals who believe they are invincible are always dangerous. They might decide to provoke an incident to show their strength, and maybe impress the “Dear Leader.”
US and South Korean politicians and military leaders should tread cautiously.
Dreams and nightmares
In the 1980s, I had recurring nightmares about nuclear war. Lots of people did. The nightmares, unfortunately, corresponded all too closely to the waking world, where tens of thousands of US and Soviet nuclear weapons were pointed at everyone, everywhere, at all times. We were exposed to a steady stream of graphic images on TV, in films, and in the print media that were not all that different from the unconscious horrors that invaded our sleep.
The problem now isn’t so much the nightmares as the dreams. We keep hearing about the “dream” of a nuclear-weapons-free world, and almost before the idea can register, we get handed the reality check. “Not in our lifetimes.” “A distant and difficult goal.” “Maybe a few decades from now, when conditions are better.” “One step at a time.”
Just this week, two more visions of a world without nuclear weapons momentarily rose above the noise generated by the May 25 North Korean nuclear test.
John McCain, Barack Obama’s opponent in the US presidential election, once again invoked the ghost of Ronald Reagan and reiterated his abolitionist campaign rhetoric on the floor of the Senate on June 3. He called nuclear weapons “the most abhorrent and indiscriminate form of warfare known to man” and said that “our highest priority must be to reduce the danger that nuclear weapons will ever be used.” Words like that aren’t heard in the US Senate too often.
One day later, a new Norwegian “gang of five,” including four former prime ministers and a former foreign minister, published their own call for a nuclear-weapon-free world in the Oslo daily Aftenposten, citing the original “gang of four” (Shultz, Kissinger, Nunn, and Perry) as their model. Insisting that “we have to be serious both about the vision and about the measures,” the Norwegians asserted that the US and Russia, “which together account for more than 90 per cent of the world’s arsenals, must take the first steps.”
A closer look at the two statements, however, uncovers significant differences in approach and a blurry and movable line between dream and reality. McCain’s statement is practically bipolar. He warns that “we…quite literally possess the means to destroy all of mankind” while, almost in the same breath, he recites the mantra that nuclear weapons are “still important to deter an attack with weapons of mass destruction against us and our allies.” To be fair, President Obama says essentially the same thing.
I’m very fond of catching logical fallacies. One of the commonplace varieties is the internal contradiction. This one can be paraphrased as: “The world would be a safer place without nuclear weapons, but while they’re here it’s a safer place with them.”
The Norwegians—Odvar Nordli, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Kåre Willoch, Kjell Magne Bondevik, and Thorvald Stoltenberg—give a nod to deterrence, too, but their angle of vision seems different somehow. “While reductions are going on, mutual deterrence will remain a basic principle of international security.” In other words, as we engage in the work of getting rid of these things, the possessors must continue to respect the imperative against using them. I’m reading between the lines, but that strikes me as different from asserting a need to hold onto nuclear weapons as a means to project overwhelming political power until you can replace them with something that works just as well.
In McCain’s view, the replacement is “robust missile defenses and superior conventional forces.” He also favors “a tough, and tough-minded, approach to both Iran and North Korea, both of whom have gotten away with too much for far too long.” Sen. McCain has made enormous personal strides toward embracing abolitionism, and has characteristically put himself at odds with his own party. Time will tell whether his “maverick” identity will lead him to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, where his principled vote will be badly needed. In the meantime, he seems not to have noticed that the US and the other nuclear weapon states have “gotten away with too much for far too long” when it comes to fulfilling their disarmament obligations.
The Norwegian gang of five has marked the road to a nuclear-weapon-free world with much better signposts. They write that the goal “must be a world where not only the weapons, but also the facilities that produce them are eliminated.” They challenge the US and Russia to “reduce their arsenals to a level where the other nuclear weapon states may join in negotiations of global limitations.” (Abolition NGOs have suggested that the right level for engaging China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, and Israel in a real push for zero is somewhere around 500 or fewer—a substantially smaller number than the US and the Russians seem to have in mind as the outcome of a new START agreement.) They don’t minimize the threats of proliferation and nuclear terrorism, but they see the solutions in cooperative, rather than punitive, action. Unlike McCain and many of the other “new” abolitionists, who support missile defenses, the Norwegians caution that “the establishment of missile shields should be avoided, for they stimulate rearmament….Ongoing missile defence plans and programmes should therefore be subordinated to the work for comprehensive nuclear disarmament.” They have that right, too.
As much as their statement adds to the roadmap toward a world without nuclear weapons, the gang of five neglects to mention the Nuclear Weapons Convention. Diplomats seem to have an allergic reaction to the Convention. During the Q&A period at an NPT PrepCom side event last month, I asked Gareth Evans, the co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament and an ICAN supporter, whether the Commission would seriously review the content of the Model NWC before issuing its recommendations later this year. He assured me that was the Commission’s intention, but also wondered out loud whether the Convention was not a bit too “purist” – dreamlike, if you will. Gro Harlem Brundtland, who is the Norwegian commissioner and a member of the gang of five, should be encouraged to hold Evans to that promise. The Convention needs diplomatic champions.
It is less than 2 weeks until the Global Week of Action Against Gun Violence 15-21 June 2009. Please consider helping to launch IPPNW’s new “Medical Voices Against Violence:Your Story” project during this week.
Send us your stories in advance, or collect stories at your medical schools or hospitals during the Week of Action. It’s easy to record a short story – just use your digital camera and record a 1-3 minute story about an incident of gun violence you experienced, or happened in your community or to someone you know like a family member, friend, or patient– introduce yourself at the beginning with your first name only, what you do (medical student, doctor et.) and your country – then tell your short story and how if affected you as a health professional. If you can’t record a story, write one and send us a photo of you and we will print them together. Contact me for how to transmit big video files. Let’s make this a worldwide IPPNW event!
Other ideas for activities:
- Hold a “teach-in” or hospital “grand rounds” on small arms violence and health, using the IPPNW Aiming for Prevention PowerPoint, and/or One Bullet Stories that are on IPPNW’s web site. ( Contact me for a copy of the PPT). Or, use modules from the WHO TEACH-VIP curriculum.
- Write an op-ed or letters to the editor to local newspapers about the human suffering from gun violence in your country
- Organize as many doctors, nurses and other medical professionals as possible to have a public event/press conference to provide “testimony” about victims of violence they have treated in their hospitals, and call for more violence prevention initiatives in the community.
- Call your local radio station or newspaper reporter and ask them to conduct an interview with you about health effects of violence – if you need materials, contact us.
- Investigate if your medical school has any financial investments in gun manufacturers. If so, hold a press conference to call for divestment.
- Faces/stories of violence exhibit – Collect photos/stories from newspapers of shootings/other violence over the past year in your area, paste on posters, and organize an educational exhibit at your school, library or other venue – call the press to come publicize.
Medical Voices Against Violence – Submit Your Story
Have you had a personal experience with violence? Did it influence you to get involved with IPPNW or an affiliate or in other work for peace?
If so, please participate in IPPNW’s new Medical Voices Against Violence: Your Story project.
The objective of this new initiative is to highlight the human face of violence, especially armed violence, by collecting personal stories from IPPNW members around the world. We intend to use these stories to educate others via our Aiming for Prevention campaign, a health approach to armed violence prevention. Stories will be posted on the internet, included on CDs, and distributed at educational sessions on violence prevention.
We will launch this project worldwide through IPPNW affiliates during the Global Week of Action Against Gun Violence 15-21 June, 2009.
How You Can Participate:
We are seeking people to share their testimonies via video, audio, or photos and text about experiences with violence – direct or indirect. You may share something that happened to you, your family, community, country, school, work and/or neighborhood. Give us a brief description of what happened, and a brief explanation of what you felt. Also, if relevant, include how this experience made you take action or how it connected you to IPPNW and affiliates and its work for peace through health. Please do not use names of people other than your own, and please only provide your first name.
Submission formats:
o Video: 30 sec – 3 min – In Windows media or other computer-readable format
o Voice/audio recording: (include photo of yourself in JPEG format).
30 sec – 3 min
o Written: 1-2 paragraphs (include photo of yourself in JPEG format)
Please Include:
• Your first name (first name only please),
• Profession
• Nationality
• Place and general timeframe of experience, and a brief description of the experience in your own words.
To submit your story, contact Maria Valenti and we will provide transmission instructions for large video files. IPPNW will review your story and contact you with any questions. We will require a consent form for distribution.
Maybe We Should Take the North Koreans At Their Word
by Tad Daley
Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. “The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence.” If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing, Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear arms do appear to serve North Korea’s national security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize that they mean what they say.
From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to one’s adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War’s long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on “nuclear use theorists” — whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS — that in the nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict upon that opponent “unacceptable damage” in reply. If an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as long as that damage was “unacceptable”), then, according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the possible obliteration of, oh, a state’s capital city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?
Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this “unacceptable damage” model of nuclear deterrence — which we might as well call UD — failed to put the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the opponent’s society, “mutually assured destruction,” which soon came to be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression — nuclear attacks on an adversary’s nuclear weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an adversary’s closest allies (in Western and Eastern Europe) — that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side from using their nuclear weapons against one’s own cities and society, by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent’s cities and society in reply. “The Department of Defense,” said an Ohio congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, “has become the Department of Retaliation.”
Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow the arms race often employed the logic of UD in their attempts to do so. “Our twenty thousandth bomb,” said Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic weapons, as early as 1953, “will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth.” “Deterrence does not depend on superiority,” said the great strategist Bernard Brodie in 1965. “There is no foreign policy objective today that is so threatened,” said retired admiral and former CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1998, “that we would … accept the risk of receiving just one nuclear detonation in retaliation.”
Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the contemporary international environment, to the twin nuclear challenges that have dominated the headlines during most of the past decade, and to the most immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting the Obama Administration. Because the most persuasive explanation for the nuclear quests on which both Iran and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the notion that “deterrence does not depend on superiority.” Deterrence depends only an ability to strike back. Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them — by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation.
Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its most powerful potential adversary — the United States — in any kind of direct military confrontation. They cannot repel an actual attack upon them. They cannot shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky. Indeed, no state can.
However, what these countries can aspire to do is to dissuade the American leviathan from launching such an attack. How? By developing the capability to instantly vaporize an American military base or three in Iraq or Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Japan, or even an American city on one coast or the other. And by making it implicitly clear that they would respond to any kind of assault by employing that capability immediately, before it’s too late, following the venerable maxim: “Use them or lose them.” The obliteration of an entire American military base, or an entire American naval formation, or an entire American city, would clearly seem to qualify as “unacceptable damage” for the United States.
Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North Korea do not need thousands of nuclear warheads. They just need a couple of dozen, well hidden and well protected. American military planners might be almost certain that they could take out all the nuclear weapons in these countries in some kind of a dramatic lightning “surgical strike.” However, with nuclear weapons, “almost” is not good enough. Even the barest possibility that such a strike would fail, and that just one or two nuclear weapons would make it into the air, detonate over targets, and result in massive “unacceptable damage” for the United States, would in virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to dissuade Washington from undertaking such a strike.
In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and North Korea would not intend for their nascent nuclear arsenals to deter only nuclear attacks upon them. If the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States disappeared tomorrow morning, but America’s conventional military superiority remained, it still would be the case that the only possible military asset that these states could acquire, to effectively deter an American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.
The “Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples,” a mouthpiece for the North Korean government, captured Pyongyang’s logic quite plainly just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “The Iraqi war taught the lesson that … the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force …” Similarly, a few weeks earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a North Korean general was asked to defend his country’s nuclear weapons program, and with refreshing candor replied, “We see what you are getting ready to do with Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us.”
It really is quite a remarkable development. North Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet — in contrast to all the debate that has taken place in recent years about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran — no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it seems every bit as effective as MAD. North Korea today possesses no more than a handful of nuclear warheads, and maintains nothing like a “mutual” nuclear balance with the United States. In addition, the retaliation that North Korea can threaten cannot promise anything like a complete “assured destruction.” To vaporize an American carrier group in the Sea of Japan, or a vast American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even an American city, would not be at all the same thing as the “destruction” of the entire American nation — as the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.
And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in precisely the same way. Astonishingly, it seems that Washington finds itself every bit as thoroughly deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than 10 nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with 10,000. Although UD hardly contains the rich acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it appears that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their national security strategies solidly upon it.
There is very little reason to suppose that other states will not soon follow their lead.
President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has not only made a nuclear weapon-free Iran and North Korea one of his central foreign policy priorities, he has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear weapon-free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge outdoor rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” (Unfortunately, he followed that with the statement that nuclear weapons abolition would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” suggesting that neither he nor the nuclear policy officials in his administration fully appreciate the magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do they really think the human race can retain nuclear weapons for another half century or so, yet manage to dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear terror, or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control every single time?)
The one thing we can probably say for sure about the prospects for universal nuclear disarmament is that no state will agree either to abjure or to dismantle nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a course is the best course for its own national security. To persuade states like North Korea and Iran to climb aboard the train to abolition would probably require simultaneous initiatives on three parallel tracks. One track would deliver foreign and defense policies that assure weaker states that we do not intend to attack them, that just as we expect them to abide by the world rule of law they can expect the same from us, that the weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince weaker states that on balance, overall, their national security will better be served in a world where no one possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a world where they do — but so too do many others. And another track still would deliver nuclear weapons policies that directly address the long-simmering resentments around the world about the long-standing nuclear double standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of nuclear hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear non-proliferation to nuclear disarmament.
The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of course, does not reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It resides instead in Washington.
Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy organization. His first book, APOCALYPSE NEVER: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in January 2010.
The Tortoise is Breathing
As the 2009 NPT PrepCom drew to a close, one of the African delegates was reported to have quipped “The tortoise is breathing.”
There was little disagreement — among the “diplos” and NGOs alike — that this was a successful PrepCom at a time when success was badly needed. All of the procedural issues were resolved quickly, and without the destructive behavior that had blocked progress since 2000. As a result, the 2010 Review has a forward-looking agenda , and all signs are that the delegates will engage in serious discussions about very specific disarmament and non-proliferation objectives, many of which are reflected in the 13-step action plan adopted in 2000. There is even talk of a five-year plan with measurable goals as an outcome of the 2010 Review that can be evaluated in 2015.
That’s the good news. The disappointment for NGOs and for many delegations was the inability to reach consensus around the recommendations drafted by the Chair. A very strong first draft distributed by Ambassador Chidyausiku at the end of the first week (see “Will the NPT finally open its arms to the Nuclear Weapons Convention?”) had been significantly watered down by the opening of the second week. The explicit reference to the Nuclear Weapons Convention had been removed, as had the clause on halting qualitative improvements of nuclear weapon systems. The rest of the language relating to disarmament came across as much more conditional than it had been in the Chair’s very straightforward first draft.
Almost as soon as the second draft appeared, the divisions in the room between ardent supporters of the first draft — largely from the non-aligned movement — and supporters of the second draft — largely though not exclusively the nuclear weapon states — became apparent. Some states said they could have supported either version, but in a process where consensus rules, the outcome was predictable. The PrepCom ended without agreement on substantive recommendations to the 2010 Review.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A set of recommendations to the liking of civil society would have been the icing on the cake, but we can be happy that the cake came out of the oven without falling. The disagreements over substance are real, and the draft recommendations served as a focal point for lively discussions among the delegates — and between delegates and NGOs — for an entire week — something that never happened during the gridlocked years of the Bush administration. The fact that the PrepCom didn’t tie the Review Conference to the weaker language of the revised draft recommendations gives NGOs much more latitude in the coming year to influence the content of the Review.
Pardon my uncharacteristic exuberance, but when I read the following sentence in the just-released draft recommendations to the 2010 NPT Review Conference on the Amtrak train from New York to Boston this afternoon, I nearly jumped out of my seat:
Examine, inter alia, ways and means to commence negotiations, in accordance with Article VI, on a convention or framework of agreements to achieve global nuclear disarmament, and to engage non-parties to the treaty.”
Before you put me into a home for the terminally dull, what that means in plain, non-diplomatic English, is that the Chair of the 2009 PrepCom, Boniface Chidyausiku of Zimbabwe, has done in one sentence what the NGO community has spent 12 mostly dark years trying to accomplish: he has made the Nuclear Weapons Convention part of the NPT work plan. Specifically, he has identified the Convention as the implicit goal of Article VI of the NPT, and has called on states to explore ways to commence negotiations on a Convention, even as they work on strengthening disarmament and non-proliferation objectives to which they have already agreed.
If this sentence survives the second week of the PrepCom and remains in the recommendations forwarded to the Review Conference, all NPT states — including the NPT nuclear weapon states — will be honor bound to engage in a serious discussion of the Convention from this point forward. Moreover, part of their task, spelled out explicitly by the Chair, will be to find creative ways to include the non-NPT nuclear weapon states — India, Pakistan, Israel, and the prodigal DPRK — in the disarmament process.
This does not mean that negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention will begin tomorrow, or even in June 2010. The representatives of the nuclear weapon states at the PrepCom continue to talk about the Convention as something off in the distance, maybe 30 or 40 years from now. We still have a lot of work to do if we’re to convince them that the whole process could come to a conclusion much sooner.
Nevertheless, this is a significant breakthrough. One of the most frequently expressed criticisms of the Nuclear Weapons Convention, other than the feeling among many diplomats that taking it up is premature, is that the NWC somehow competes with or would distract from desperately needed measures to strengthen the NPT. During the formal NGO session on May 6, we rebutted that argument, making it plain that the NWC and the NPT are closely linked and mutually reinforce each other.
“The aim of NWC negotiations,” we told the delegates, “is not to provide an alternative to the NPT, rather to develop an additional instrument that would build upon the NPT and other nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament measures. It would thus be sensible to connect NWC negotiations closely with the ongoing efforts to implement and strengthen the NPT.”
By echoing that point of view in the draft recommendations, and by including it as a prominent element of the proposed action plan on disarmament, Chairperson Chidyausiku has not only validated the single most important goal NGOs brought with them into this PrepCom, but has also shown how essential interim steps can be placed in a comprehensive framework — something else that has been central to NGO arguments in favor of the Convention.
At the very least, well respected members of the diplomatic and parliamentarian communities have been speaking up for the Convention at this PrepCom. Jayantha Dhanapala, a former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament and the current President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs told participants at an IPPNW-sponsored PrepCom workshop that Article VI of the NPT anticipates negotiation of an NWC. He was joined in this assessment by Randy Rydell, a senior political affairs officer in the UN Office of the High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Rydell’s former boss, Hans Blix, has also endorsed the Convention. Henrik Salander, the new Chair of the Middle Powers Initiative and the Chair of the 2002 NPT PrepCom, has offered some strong words of support as well. Just to name a few.
The nuclear weapon states may be less than ecstatic about this, but the one idea that would completely eliminate nuclear weapons and prohibit them as a matter of international law is starting to get some traction.
The draft recommendations to the 2010 Review reaffirm the importance of the commitments made at the 1995 Review and Extension Conference and the 2000 Review, and acknowledge that those commitments have not yet been fulfilled. What the parties to the NPT should do in 2010, the recommendations state, is set “practical, achievable and specified goals and measures leading to the elimination of nuclear weapons.” Is it just my wishful thinking, or do others hear the desire for a time frame in that?
Among the specific interim steps mentioned are CTBT ratification, negotiation of a fissile materials ban, diminished operational status (which means taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, at long last), deep and verifiable reductions, irreversibility, and others that were part of the 13-step action plan endorsed in 2000 and that were relentlessly trashed by the Bush administration right through 2008. The recommendation that might actually have the greatest repercussions in the short term, were it to gain acceptance, is that there be no qualitative improvements in nuclear arsenals. Stopping the modernization of nuclear weapons and of the infrastructure to produce warhead components and delivery systems really would make abolition only a matter of time.
We all agree that the NPT is the foundation of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, the walls of which would be strengthened by the mortar of a CTBT, a fissile materials treaty, stronger safeguards, and other interim measures. What has eluded the diplomatic imagination up until now is the recognition that the Nuclear Weapons Convention is the capstone of the whole edifice. Maybe that idea is finally starting to sink in.
IPPNW Interview: Xanthe Hall
Xanthe Hall is a disarmament expert and long-time antinuclear campaigner for IPPNW-Germany. Her views are sought and respected on topics ranging from missile defenses to a nuclear-weapons-free Europe. VS asked Xanthe about the current political landscape in Germany and about the prospects for a nuclear-weapons-free world.
IPPNW: European NGOs are demanding that NATO take a hard look at its nuclear weapons policies as it marks its 60th anniversary. What is IPPNW-Germany contributing to this campaign?
XH: IPPNW-Germany is one of the main organizations behind the three-year campaign “our future—nuclear weapon free”—supported by 50 organizations Germany-wide—which aims to get the US nuclear weapons withdrawn from Germany by 2010. Through this campaign we are highlighting in particular the nuclear sharing agreement in NATO, which provides for member states to host US nuclear weapons, to provide logistics and pilots, and to take part in nuclear planning for a potential NATO nuclear attack. When we started this campaign, most people here did not even know that there were still nuclear weapons in Germany. We changed this by having a large demonstration and actions at the Büchel nuclear base last summer. At the 60th anniversary this week in Strasbourg, many of us will be there. We will run a workshop on the nuclear weapons’ issue and talk about how changes in the US and UK nuclear policies might affect NATO nuclear policy, which is up for review again after the Strasbourg meeting. There is a general election in Germany this year, so we are asking candidates to take a definite position on the US nuclear weapons. After the election, we will ask the governing parties (at least one of which will be for the withdrawal) to write it into the coalition agreement that these weapons will be withdrawn. The goal is that by the next NPT Review Conference this decision will have been taken and can be announced, thus adding momentum to the disarmament debate.
IPPNW: You just organized a successful panel on the Nuclear Weapons Convention at the Middle Powers Initiative’s Article VI Forum in Berlin. Are diplomats and government officials more receptive to the Convention than they were a year or so ago? Read more…
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